Gaming

Feral Interactive announced today that it started ported the Rise of the Tomb Raider dramatic action-adventure game featuring the gorgeous Lara Croft for the macOS and Linux platforms.

Initially released in early November 2015 for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Xbox One gaming consoles, and a year later for Sony's PlayStation 4 console, Rise of the Tomb Raider was available for the PC master race only on the Microsoft Windows operating system since January 2016.

Using the latest Vulkan (on Linux) and Metal 2 API (on macOS) graphics technologies, the superb and thrilling Rise of the Tomb Raider adventure game is currently being ported by Feral Interactive, an UK-based video games publisher known for porting Tomb Raider 2013, to Mac and Linux platforms.

If you're after a slightly more realistic farming sim, as in one that's not 2D pixel stuff, Cattle and Crops [Steam, Official Site] certainly seems interesting.

Correct me if I'm wrong, I did look, but this might be the first "proper" farming sim to be made available on Linux. I didn't find anything else like it, so that's progress I guess. Earlier today, the game released on Steam and it's currently still in-development, so it's an Early Access title. The good news, is that Linux support is already there and it works reasonably well.

Not that it really means all that much for us, but interesting nonetheless, THQ Nordic has acquired Koch Media GmbH.

Naturally, the announcements contain a lot of legal-speak, but some of it is quite interesting. THQ Nordic have actually put out a few Linux games like the revamp of Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, the updated Imperium Galactica II and the RPG Silver. They're also the publisher of games that support Linux like The Book of Unwritten Tales, This Is the Police, The Dwarves and a bunch more.

What do you get when you attempt to turn everything into Golf? Silly physics-based anti-golf game WHAT THE GOLF? [Official Site, Fig Campaign] aims to answer that question. It's a game aimed at people who might find normal Golf a bit boring, like me.

It's being developed by developer Triband, who are also working on "Keyboard Sports - Saving QWERTY" [Steam] which will also have Linux support that will release sometime this year.

While searching for other farming sims while covering Cattle and Crops, I ended up coming across Fantasy Farming: Orange Season [Steam, Official Site, itch.io] and it just recently added Linux support. It's being developed by Hudell Tales, which is made up on a single developer.

Note: It's currently in Early Access so it's not finished—expect bugs.

Here are our initial performance figures for the Vega graphics found on the newly-released Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APU under Linux and testing both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks. CPU tests as well as benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G under Linux are forthcoming on Phoronix.

10tons Ltd have announced another new game, this time it's not a top-down shooter. Undead Horde [Official Site], an action RPG where you play as a necromancer.

The developer, 10tons Ltd, previously worked on Crimsonland, Neon Chrome, JYDGE and most recently Tesla vs Lovecraft. All of which support Linux! Another developer pushing out plenty of rather good Linux games is pleasing to see.

Starmancer [Kickstarter], a space station sim inspired by Dwarf Fortress currently on Kickstarter will have full Linux support, even during alpha and beta. It looks damn good too! It doesn't just look good, the features they're developing for it sound really quite brilliant too.

Porting specialists Feral Interactive are bringing Rise of the Tomb Raider to macOS and Linux.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration is a content complete version of Crystal Dynamics’ highly acclaimed Tomb Raider sequel. The Mac and Linux editions include the base game, first released in 2015, plus the full complement of DLC content.

...it’s open source. sure, you could in theory just turn on the pocketsprite wi-fi, connect your computer up to it, and download games via pocketsprite’s desktop interface, but where’s the challenge in that? if you understand a few youtube-tutorial’s-worth of hacking, you could upload whatever you want to this tiny emulator...

Many asked, now Feral Interactive have answered. Rise of the Tomb Raider [Steam] is officially on the way to Linux! What a fantastic way to start a Tuesday with news like this! It still amazes me to this day that Linux will have games like this, very happy with the news!

Feral aren't saying exactly when it will arrive, but they had a tweet out that said "This Winter" which has since been deleted (Edit: replaced with this one). You can see the official confirmation on their official site which now says "This spring", so it could be here sometime between March and late June.

Feral Interactive has announced today that they are porting Rise of the Tomb Raider to Linux.

Rise of the Tomb Raider was released for Windows in January of 2016 as the latest in the Tomb Raider franchise. Now two years later the Linux port will be released in the months ahead. When Feral has asked the community about games coming to Linux, this title has repeatedly been brought up as a title many Linux gamers would like to see following the port of the 2013 Tomb Raider game.

Since Steam already works (with full game controller support) on Windows 10, I didn’t bother trying to install Steam or any heavier-duty games in Linux.

Overall I’d say that for now Linux on the GPD Win 2 is a bit of a mixed bag, at least for the prototype I’m testing. It’s usable, but I can’t think of a lot of reasons why you would really choose it over Windows 10 on this particular device… unless you either really hate Windows or really know what you’re doing and think you might be able to get the non-working hardware to function properly.

That said, there is a way to have the best of both worlds. The GPD Win 10 ships with the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update pre-installed, which means you can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to install Ubuntu or OpenSUSE from the Windows Store.

It's been a while since Can't Drive This [Steam] gained Linux support, so I finally set aside some time to take a proper look. An amusing idea, where one player races and the other builds the track as you go.

Every popular hardware in today’s times that tries to bind users to a particular software or operating system, becomes a target of hackers. They make continuous attempts to find ways to exploit the security measures. Along the similar lines, hacker group Fail0verflow has claimed to have found a Nintendo Switch hack.

The group has posted the picture of Switch booting a Debian GNU/Linux installation. The picture also shows a serial adapter connected to one Joy-Con docks. Notably, Fail0verflow is the same group that hacked Nintendo Wii and PlayStation 3.

A Linux gaming distro, as the name suggests, is tailored for avid gamers. As such it usually comes bundled with games to play, as well as drivers for graphics cards, games controllers and so forth.

There aren't many Linux distros specifically made for gaming. This isn't because Linux users dislike games, but rather it’s due to the fact that most modern Linux distros support virtually every type of recent graphics card anyway. As such, any regular Linux distro can easily be turned into a ‘game station’.

Razer is a vendor that makes high-end gaming hardware, including laptops, keyboards and mice. I opened a ticket with Razor a few days ago asking them if they wanted to support the LVFS project by uploading firmware and sharing the firmware update protocol used. I offered to upstream any example code they could share under a free license, or to write the code from scratch given enough specifications to do so. This is something I’ve done for other vendors, and doesn’t take long as most vendor firmware updaters all do the same kind of thing; there are only so many ways to send a few kb of data to USB devices. The fwupd project provides high-level code for accessing USB devices, so yet-another-update-protocol is no big deal. I explained all about the LVFS, and the benefits it provided to a userbase that is normally happy to vote using their wallet to get hardware that’s supported on the OS of their choice.

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